Gardening Ideas Worth Sharing

My Best Gardening Ideas

My best gardening ideas are planting a garden that has little maintenance and hardly any weeds to pull.

A garden that requires hardly any tilling and no sprinkler or watering system that I have to constantly stay on top of.

You might be thinking that my gardening ideas are more of a dream, but I promise you that they are real, I have been gardening this way for years and boy howdy does it work!

I’m not the only person to have ever come up with an idea like this, far from it I think, I saw a similar idea in use while I was in China. I’ve seen other variations in other peoples gardens around where I live, but I’ve taken it and made it my own version.

I know there are lots of gardening ideas around the web and some are really good and some are not. This idea is not about being cheap, saving money or even necessarily about less work, but it is about streamlining, maximizing your effort and time. As in how much time I do not have to spend hovering over every row of my garden pulling weeds!

I think we can all agree that gardening can be hard work, but if you are like me it is more like a labor of love! Growing fresh produce to enjoy all summer and freezing a good portion to enjoy throughout the winter, makes it well worth it to me.

Where To Start

To start, assuming you have a plot you plant in every year, instead of turning the whole thing up, just till where you are going to plant. I will till up rows for stuff like corn, okra, onions, cabbage etc. and make mounds for my tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and other plants that vine, etc.

To automate the irrigation system I stretch a soaker hose down all the rows and over your dirt mounds. I hook all of this up to a timer, which automates my irrigation, which I set and forget.

With the hose stretched down each row use a landscaping staple and pin the hose down on each end. Take a garden rake and pull dirt over the top of the soaker hose, from each side. Now take the garden rake and use the back side (prongs pointing up) and gently pull it down the row gently following the hose, exposing the crown of your soaker hose. Repeat this for all of your rows. For the mounds, pin the soaker hose down on each side of the mound at the base. Now bury and gently rake the dirt off with the backside of the rake, exposing the crown of the hose.

The reason for burying the soaker hose is to keep in place so it doesn’t move out of place depriving plants of water or sliding over seedlings and killing them.

Make it Weed Free (Well Almost)

Now I cover the entire garden in black 4 mil or 6 mil plastic tarp. I use one sheet of plastic for each row or mound, so it’s easy to reuse with the same holes for planting you put through it the first time, this helps you to get the most for your money. I have had sheets of plastic last for seven or eight years. Considering a 100’x20′ 4 mil back tarp cost somewhere around $100 that equals about $14 per year for the entire 100’x20′ roll of plastic.

I don’t know about you, but to me that’s a fair trade for getting my time back.

To be honest there are more details to how I put together this type of garden, how I fertilize etc., but for the sake of not droning on I will save those details for another day.